For Swiss, a Distasteful Jolt With Coffee: Hitler Creamer

PARIS — The labels on Swiss mini-cream containers tend toward the pastoral and cuddly, with pleasant images of Alpine landscapes and locomotives, or dogs and cats. So it was something of a shock to one consumer at a Swiss train station to find the face of Hitler staring back at him when he reached to lighten his morning coffee.

Migros, a Swiss retail giant, said it did not know exactly how the image came to be on the label. But it offered its apologies Wednesday for the “unforgivable incident” and withdrew about 2,000 containers, some of which also featured the face of Mussolini, from about 100 cafes in the German-speaking part of Switzerland.

Tristan Cerf, a spokesman for Migros, said by telephone from Lausanne on Wednesday that the company had been horrified by the failure of its internal controls to detect the images on its cream containers.

He said the problem had come to Migros’s attention after a customer drinking coffee at the Baden train station was startled by the discovery and sent a photo of the label to the newspaper 20 Minutes.

In coffee-loving Switzerland, labels from the mini-cream containers are cult collectibles, and producers often seek new and inventive ways to enhance their appeal.

Mr. Cerf said the mishap had occurred when an outside company asked ELSA, a dairy manufacturer and Migros subsidiary, to supply a series of 55 coffee cream containers based on vintage cigar labels, two of which featured the dictators.

He said that the outside company had provided the controversial designs, and that ELSA typically produced plastic creamers with charming and innocuous images on them — not fascists.

“I can’t tell you how these labels got past our controls,” Mr. Cerf said. “Usually the labels have pleasant images like trains, landscapes and dogs — nothing polemic that can pose a problem.”

Switzerland has in the past been forced to grapple with its relationship with the Nazis during World War II, including accusations that Swiss banks abetted the National Socialist regime.

But Mr. Cerf emphasized that the accidental circulation of the plastic Hitler creamers had nothing to do with the country’s social mores, but rather reflected an isolated mistake.

Migros is not the first company to run into such trouble. In the spring, a German furniture chain apologized for selling ceramic mugs with Hitler’s face on them, saying a Chinese designer had mistakenly used an old image of a stamp bearing the dictator’s image behind an antique motif of roses.

“Whoever made this mistake was not thinking properly,” Mr. Cerf said of his company’s creamers, “as these aren’t images accompanying a book about World War II, but rather something meant to be enjoyed with coffee and a chocolate cake.

“You cannot put Pol Pot or a terrorist on a milk creamer,” he added. “It is unacceptable.”

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